In online transaction processing (OLTP) environments, data processing efficiency provides a competitive advantage. An organization known as the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) runs benchmark testing (TPC-E) that simulates the OLTP workload of a brokerage firm to evaluate transaction processing performance. The focus of the benchmark is a central database that executes transactions related to the brokerage firm's customer accounts. Although the underlying business model of TPC-E is a brokerage firm, the database schema, data population, transactions, and implementation rules are designed to be broadly representative of other modern OLTP systems.
To improve data processing efficiency, multiple processor (multi-core) systems are utilized to run the database programs. Various locking and other contention management schemes are used to avoid conflicts. However, on multi-core systems, when the number of cores exceeds sixteen, contention for the lock has been found to cause severe scalability problems. As any improvements in online transaction processing are highly beneficial, resolving such scalability issues to any extent in multi-core systems configured for online transaction processing is of value.